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Thursday, February 16, 2012

As I wrote on Monday, I want to spend more time in lowsec. I actually started the process Saturday as I did a few items on my agenda that require skirting the edges of Empire space.

First up, transporting some frigate and cruiser BPOs to a station to make copies for invention. Here's a tip. Carebears are afraid of getting shot at so lowsec and highsec stations that require traveling through lowsec to access usually have shorter waiting times for copy slots than those safely in the core of Empire space. My favorite stations are in highsec systems that require travel through lowsec. That way I don't have to worry too much about getting ganked when leaving a station.

So I pulled up the industry interface from my neocom and found what I was looking for; 10 copy slots with only 8 & 9 day waits in my favorite system for copying/researching blueprints. Only one jump through lowsec. A nice way to get my feet wet again.

I put the BPOs in Wandering Rose's Prowler and headed off for the short trip. I jumped into the system and at the gate was a single ship. That's right, I'm in a lowsec system completely surrounded by highsec and on the gate was a -10 pilot in a Phobos. I wondered if the flashy pirate in the heavy intedictor was associated with the Manticore pilot who had paced me in his stealth bomber for three jumps. Yes, I'm getting better at not panicking at the first sign of trouble. I then figured, what the heck, he saw the gate flash so he knows someone is with him. So I waited a bit to try to lull him to sleep. I don't know if it worked or if he was just looking for bigger game because I didn't notice him try to lock me as I aligned, cloaked and warped. I don't know if he grew bored or was driven off because when I came back through the system five minutes later he was gone.

My next task was recruiting 2 new research agents and collecting all the datacores my existing 8 agents had churned out since I last went to Bulgaria. If you follow the blog, you know that means I've been a bad player and hadn't visited them in over 5 months. Luckily, research agents are geeks and just want to be left alone and work so were not offended. But I had a lot of datacores to collect. So I formed fleet with Rosewalker in a Cheetah and Wandering Rose in her blockade runner and started the 86 jump circuit to collect them. Why cloaky ships? Because two of the agents live in lowsec.

Visiting my first lowsec agent in Alal was pretty non-eventful. No wrecks at any of the gates and only one other pilot in local during the trip. A good thing because by this time Wandering Rose was carrying 650 datacores. Rosewalker spotted for Wandering Rose just in case and back to highsec I scurried. After the experience, I docked up and went to bed.

On Sumday I resumed my trip. I felt a bit nervous with all the datacores in my holds, but I don't believe in the autopilot so I would align, cloak and gang warp from gate to gate. The last agent I visited lives in a lowsec system in Metropolis that gets a bit more traffic than Alal. So I emptied Wandering Rose's cargo hold and sent Rosewalker in to scout. Rosewalker did more than scout. He set up observation bookmarks at all of the gates and stations. Once that task was done Wandering Rose entered the system to spot for him as he created instawarp bookmarks for every station but one.

The time I spent making bookmarks made me a huge fan of corp bookmarks. While Rosewalker made the observation bookmarks at the gates, he would make them a corp bookmark. Then he would copy to his own folders and then Wandering Rose, safely sitting in a station, would do the same. I once tried to copy bookmarks into a container and trading them between characters but that just didn't work well.

The more time I spend in lowsec the more comfortable I get. Perhaps that is the effect of having bookmarks. The more places I have to hide the better. But I am not going to get too confident because anything can happen. According to Dotlan the next system I plan to visit saw Eve University slugging it out with Pandemic Legion yesterday. Scary, but time to get over the fear.

1 comment:

I can tell you why the pirate did not try to lock you ;).Because he was experienced enough to know that it's absolutely fruitless to try and lock a prowler. If the prowler pilot isn't making dumb mistakes a pirate will never catch one. Even if it doesn't immediately recloak after warp aligning on gate it's nearly impossible to catch it because of the ship's great inertia, speed and the relatively low signature. You're in warp before he can lock you. Well unless you crippled it with cargo rigs or expanders or he sits in an interceptor. But gate camping in anything smaller than a BC usually ends being killed by the sentries :D.Two nanofibre II and a 10MN MWD and this ship is nearly invulnerable even without a CovOps Cloak. With one it's a case for the nerf bat :D.